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How Jurgen Klinsmann Plans to Make U.S. Soccer Better (and Less American)

Jurgen Klinsmann celebrating a goal against Mexico in an exhibition game in April.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

Even before he exiled the most accomplished and iconic player in United States soccer history and before his presumptive top goal scorer went nearly an entire season without scoring goals and before he knew whom, exactly, his team was actually going to play, Jurgen Klinsmann was sure he was going to lose.

“We cannot win this World Cup, because we are not at that level yet,” Klinsmann told me over lunch in December. “For us, we have to play the game of our lives seven times to win the tournament.”

He leaned back in his chair on the terrace at a Newport Beach restaurant, not far from where he lives in Southern California. Then he shrugged and said, “Realistically, it is not possible.”

If such candor seems a bit un-American, well, that is sort of the point. While Klinsmann, a German soccer legend now charged with leading the United States, certainly hopes to surprise some people when his team faces Ghana, Portugal and Germany in its group-stage games, he also believes that judging his tenure in charge of the national team will be necessarily more complex.

As far as this year’s World Cup in Brazil goes, success is subjective. For some, a few close losses in which the Americans score a goal or two will do. For others, three ties would be great. Finishing as one of the top two teams in the group and emerging as one of the final 16 in the knockout rounds would be fantastic. In other words, this is not a bottom-line situation like, say, an N.F.L. season. Soccer fans tend to be more realistic than that. Raised on a steady diet of disappointment, they are far more patient than fans of American football.

Klinsmann knows that winning the tournament is not the only way for him to be considered a success. His time as the leader of American soccer will instead be judged with more nuance. Are there more consistent performances by the American junior national teams? Is there a more uniform coaching philosophy guiding the different programs? Can the U.S. produce a single homegrown American superstar to carry the flag for the country on the sport’s biggest stages, the way Gareth Bale, say, does for tiny Wales at Real Madrid? These things, and more, matter.

In Klinsmann’s mind — and job description — the long view is always in sight, even in the midst of World Cup myopia. That is one reason a player everyone has heard of, Landon Donovan, the national team’s all-time leader in goals and assists, was not picked to go to Brazil. That is one reason a player no one has heard of, Julian Green, was.

The Donovan episode, for all the backlash it produced, is emblematic, in many ways, of Klinsmann’s persona — a persona that, in its mix of European and American identity, can take some getting used to. When Klinsmann told Donovan he was being cut (and when he was explaining himself at a news conference the next day), he was affable and upbeat, praising Donovan’s skills to the point of awkwardness but then saying other players were “a tiny little bit ahead of him.”

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Klinsmann with his American team at a training session in March.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

Yet behind the scenes, Klinsmann was abrupt, colder. The day before announcing the cuts, he told reporters (and U.S. Soccer Federation staff members) that he was not ready to settle on his roster. When Klinsmann then went public with his final decision a day later, many officials at U.S. Soccer were caught off guard. Despite the magnitude of the decision, Klinsmann essentially acted alone. There was no discussion with higher-ups, for example, about the business ramifications of leaving Donovan, the face of American soccer, off the team.

Klinsmann simply decided he did not want Donovan, so a day later, Donovan was gone. All the same, the gravity of Klinsmann’s decision (and his disregard for Donovan’s history) might also be seen by some as a measure of success. Klinsmann was hired to bring about change. Getting rid of the national team’s most famous player, in undeniably controversial fashion, certainly qualifies.

“Jurgen is not a friend of compromise,” says Bernhard Peters, a German sports executive who has been close with Klinsmann for more than a decade. “He wants to do it his way.”

I saw Klinsmann doing it his way one frosty morning in Scotland last November. He was overseeing a practice in which 20 American players were doing a passing drill. The players stood in lines and were supposed to call out the name of a teammate, pass the ball to him and then run to a different line. It was a minor exercise, something to get everyone’s blood moving. There was supposed to be noise and urgency, fluidity and rhythm, but the players were slow getting started, mumbling the names and making halfhearted passes.

Klinsmann erupted. He cursed, several times, loudly enough that a handful of Scottish teenagers training on the next field over stopped and stared.

“What is this?” he shouted. “A funeral?” Several players dropped their heads. Klinsmann threw his knit hat to the ground. He cursed again. “Come on, wake up! Call out the names!”

When the drill resumed, the players bellowed names, and Klinsmann prowled around, alternately angry (“What are we doing here?”) and encouraging (“Yes, yes, good touch!”). At some point, he retrieved his hat. The rest of the practice went smoothly.

Klinsmann’s explosion was hard to fathom. The player who set him off was hardly a primary contributor. The game the team was preparing for was an exhibition against Scotland three days later, and the World Cup itself was a full seven months away. It was also freezing and raining, in the sort of way that defines winter in Scotland. Most coaches would have understood the players’ sluggishness; most people would have excused it.

Klinsmann did not. He wants to win every practice. He wants to win every game. He wants accountability at every moment. He wants the sort of committed, hungry, unentitled attitude that is the very opposite of what so many American pro athletes regard as their birthright.

Klinsmann believes firmly in two things: first, that a national soccer team is always racing the clock. Casual fans may not realize it, but the men responsible for coaching players in the biggest soccer games of their lives every four years actually see their players about as often as they see their barbers. (In the 500 or so days from the beginning of last year until training camp began last month, Klinsmann got to work with his top players for two days before a game here, three days before a qualifier there, for a total of no more than 40 or 50 days — roughly the length of spring training in baseball, if spring training were played in different countries and stretched out over 16 months.)

The second thing Klinsmann believes is that if the United States is ever going to really succeed at a World Cup, a specific and significant change must occur within the team. That change does not necessarily have to do with how the Americans play; rather, it has to do with the American players being too American. Put simply, Klinsmann would like to see his players carry themselves like their European counterparts — the way he used to.

The blowup in Scotland was about both of these things. Andreas Herzog, a former captain of Austria’s national team and one of Klinsmann’s assistants, smiled when I asked about Klinsmann’s outburst shortly after it happened that morning in Scotland.

“I knew right away,” Herzog told me. “I said: You know what that is? That is Jurgen being German.”

Identity in soccer is a tricky thing. There are three Colombian head coaches at this year’s World Cup, and not one coaches Colombia (an Argentine does). The men who coach Russia and Japan prefer to answer questions in Italian. One of Spain’s best players could have chosen to play for Brazil.

International soccer is no longer the simple matter it used to be: one nation pitted against another, one style against another. For years, there were clear (and obvious) strategies that were as much a part of a country’s heritage as a traditional dish or dance; the Spanish attacked patiently, say, or the Brazilians danced around the field with flair.

These days, everything is variable. At this World Cup, the famously defensive Italians plan to push the ball up the field more, and the flashy Brazilians, as much as they might not like to admit it, seem to have better defenders than attackers. The modern game has been through its own version of globalization.

The problem for the United States is that while other countries tweak their traditional blueprints, the Americans are still working on the plans for a foundation. Should they kick the ball long and chase it? Use big bodies to defend with physical aggression? Rely on what Pia Sundhage, another European brought in to coach Americans (the women’s national team, in her case), described to me as “the incredible energy that only Americans have”?

Strictly speaking, when Klinsmann signed a contract with U.S. Soccer in 2011, he became the first foreigner to coach the Americans in 16 years. From the beginning, though, everyone knew this hire was different. Klinsmann was not Bora Milutinovic, the last non-American to hold the job. Milutinovic was a mercenary, his coaching résumé basically a map of the world. Klinsmann is an immigrant, a hybrid whose job is to do well in Brazil, to be sure, but also to bring an enduring European approach to the way soccer is played in America.

“He’s a European with American sensibilities,” says Tim Howard, the veteran United States goalkeeper who also plays for Everton in England. “Look, this isn’t the N.F.L. The history of the sport is not in America. It is where he is from, in Europe. That’s something people have to realize.”

Klinsmann is well suited to bridge the gap. He lives in California, is married to an American and has raised two American children. He favors T-shirts and sneakers and in his spare time likes to fly helicopters around Orange County. When he goes to Starbucks, he gives his name as “Jonathan” — his son’s name.

Klinsmann fell for the United States in his late teens after a trip to Florida with the Stuttgarter Kickers, his first professional team. Klinsmann and a teammate had such a good time that upon landing back in Germany, they immediately booked return tickets. After Klinsmann met his wife, Debbie, during his time playing in Milan from 1989 to 1992, it was an easy decision to ultimately settle near her family in California.

Decades later, Klinsmann has embraced even the most mundane parts of America. “I like that someone asks, ‘How are you?’ ” he said. “I always say, ‘I’m fantastic!’ ”

When it comes to soccer, however, Klinsmann remains European in his outlook. He bemoans the frequent loss of top young players in America to other sports like baseball or lacrosse. He believes the N.C.A.A. is killing the talent pool in the United States because teenage stars go to college and miss out on formative years of training with professional teams. He cannot stand that Major League Soccer, the top professional league in the country, schedules its games through summer instead of winter, like the rest of the world.

If Klinsmann had his way, the United States roster would be made up of Americans playing their club soccer in Europe, facing the best competition in the world on a daily basis instead of only a few games every few years.

“The more players we can get playing at the top levels over there, the better it will be,” he told me. “That is one sign of progress.”

It is a reasonable position and a chief reason that Klinsmann, more than any previous coach, has embraced Americans with dual citizenship, like Jermaine Jones, a midfielder who was also eligible to play for Germany, or Aron Johannsson, a young forward who could have played for Iceland. Soccer is a world game, Klinsmann believes, and the American foundation should reflect and take advantage of that.

Not everyone agrees. Bruce Arena, who coaches the Los Angeles Galaxy, told me recently that instead of trying to get American soccer to mimic European culture, U.S. Soccer officials should simply look inward. Italy’s team is coached by an Italian and has a core of players who play in Italy, Arena pointed out. Spain has a Spanish coach and players primarily based in Spain. Germany is led by a German coach and mostly features players on German teams.

“I believe an American should be coaching the national team,” says Arena, who led the national team for eight years. “I think the majority of the national team should come out of Major League Soccer. The people that run our governing body think we need to copy what everyone else does, when in reality, our solutions will ultimately come from our culture.

“Come on,” he says. “We can’t copy what Brazil does or Germany does or England does. When we get it right, it’s going to be because the solutions are right here. We have the best sports facilities in the world. Why can’t we trust in that?”

The directors’ box at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, England, is not especially impressive. It is cramped, crowded and a bit musty, and it features a single bar wedged into one corner beneath a tiny TV. For a half-hour or so after Sunderland’s victory over Manchester City in a game late last year, Klinsmann waited beside a wall near the staircase, sipping a beer and talking with Herzog and Javier Perez, a scout and coach of the United States under-18 national team. The main topic of conversation, as it had been for much of the day, was Jozy Altidore.

Altidore was the reason Klinsmann came to Sunderland. Whenever he is in Europe, Klinsmann likes to check in on his players, in part to assess their current form, but also just to let them know he is thinking of them. Given how little Klinsmann gets to train his players, these sorts of psychological gymnastics are at the heart of what he does.

Altidore is an attacker, as Klinsmann was, a pure forward. Altidore was dominant for two seasons in the Dutch league, where he scored 39 goals, before moving to Sunderland and the prestige of the English Premier League. Klinsmann approved of the move — after all, it was to a top league in Europe — but on this day he was worried about Altidore’s confidence. Scoring proved more difficult for Altidore in England (he would finish the season with two goals in 40 appearances), and unlike the coaches of world soccer powers, Klinsmann does not have an array of options. Altidore, for better or worse, will play a role in Brazil.

Klinsmann and Herzog were frustrated when they learned that Altidore was not starting when they arrived at the game. Altidore entered the game as a substitute with about 15 minutes left, but he did not make a significant impact. “With us, if he gets three chances in a game, he scores one of them,” Klinsmann said at one point. “Here” — he paused, gesturing toward the field but trying to be diplomatic — “it is different.”

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A tactics board for a training session.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

When Altidore emerged from the dressing room after the game and saw Klinsmann in the lounge, he smiled. They embraced and talked briefly about the game and the situation in Sunderland, where the team had been struggling and had recently fired its coach. Altidore was upbeat. “Things are good here,” he told Klinsmann, “real good.”

Klinsmann was not convinced. He knows the fragility of a striker’s psyche. A few days later, during training in Scotland, the team was playing a small-sided game on a 50-yard field. A pass was played through to Altidore, who appeared to be offside. Herzog began to raise his arm to call the infraction, but Klinsmann shouted out, “He’s on, great ball!” He then clapped enthusiastically when Altidore coolly chipped the ball over the goalkeeper.

Afterward, Klinsmann pulled Herzog aside. “Jozy needs to score goals,” he explained quietly.

A few days later, when I told Altidore about the sequence, his appreciation was clear. “Jurgen knows how to unlock players,” he said. “That’s what his stuff is all about — unlocking us.” It was an interesting choice of words — especially coming from Altidore — because Klinsmann’s motivational techniques, which included pointedly dropping Altidore from the team for a couple of crucial World Cup qualifiers in 2012, has also occasionally been regarded as menacing.

In his nearly three years on the job, Klinsmann has played head games with just about every star he has. Whether it’s Altidore or Clint Dempsey, the national-team captain, whose accomplishments apart from the team Klinsmann has minimized, or Michael Bradley, whose father was removed as national-team coach to make way for Klinsmann, few have been spared. Yet nothing has matched Klinsmann’s issues with Donovan.

Donovan was the national team’s soul. He is a seven-time winner of the Honda Player of the Year Award, and FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, gave him its Best Young Player Award at the 2002 World Cup. His goal in the waning moments of the Algeria game in South Africa four years ago — Donovan’s third World Cup — is one of the seminal moments in United States soccer history.

But in late 2012, Donovan, then 30, decided to step away from soccer as if he were a tenured professor going on sabbatical. For about four months, Donovan floated. He spent time with family, traveled to Cambodia and blissfully pretended not to be a professional soccer player. When he returned to the Galaxy in March 2013, he said he was refreshed and rejuvenated. Arena, his coach there, had not been in favor of Donovan’s break but welcomed him back.

Klinsmann was less accommodating. By choice, Donovan’s sabbatical extended through the United States’ first three World Cup qualifying games. Then, during three more qualifiers in June, Klinsmann left Donovan home — a decision some observers found curious given Donovan’s stature.

To Klinsmann, the idea that Donovan deserved a place on the team represented much that is wrong with American sports. He has never understood the American coaching custom of deferring to a team’s stars.

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Klinsmann watching a UEFA Champions League game with his coaching staff in a hotel conference room in Arizona.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

“This always happens in America,” Klinsmann told me, waving his hands in the air. “Kobe Bryant, for example — why does he get a two-year contract extension for $50 million? Because of what he is going to do in the next two years for the Lakers? Of course not. Of course not. He gets it because of what he has done before. It makes no sense. Why do you pay for what has already happened?”

Klinsmann then turned to Donovan.

“He came back, and he was playing in M.L.S., and people say, ‘Oh, he’s playing well,’ but what does that really mean?” Klinsmann said. “This is where M.L.S. hurts him. He was playing at 70 percent, 80 percent, and he was still dominant. That doesn’t help anyone.”

Klinsmann shook his head. “I watched the games. What was I supposed to say? That he was good? He was not good. Not then. No way. So he had to wait.”

In their few public comments about each other, Donovan and Klinsmann have maintained that their relationship was fine (though Donovan declined to speak to me for this article, long before Klinsmann cut him). But even though the coolness between them was obvious, few could have predicted the rupture that took place when Klinsmann pulled Donovan aside after practice late last month. The move was so sudden that advertisements featuring Donovan were still prominent on the U.S. Soccer website hours after the roster was announced. As recently as a few days before the cuts, officials from the marketing department at U.S. Soccer had been discussing plans to use Donovan in publicity events. Several players, including Howard, the goalkeeper, praised Donovan as one of the team’s most important cogs just days before he was ushered out.

Klinsmann did not confer with any of the team’s veterans before he acted. He did not consult top officials at U.S. Soccer or anyone in Donovan’s camp. The decision — and the timing — stunned everyone.

Klinsmann knew the import of what he was doing; he did something similar as Germany’s coach in 2006, controversially benching a beloved goalkeeper. Still, this was different.

According to those close to Klinsmann, getting rid of Donovan was a result of an accumulation of things. Klinsmann felt Donovan’s play had slipped and was put off by what he saw as Donovan’s inconsistent motivation. The sabbatical was part of it, and Klinsmann’s feelings were crystallized when Donovan told ESPN during training camp that at his age, “I can’t train 12 straight days in a row and have 12 great days in a row.”

After training was over on May 22, Klinsmann had brief conversations with each of the seven players, including Donovan, who were being released. No one affiliated with the program (or with Donovan) had more than a cursory heads-up. Donovan was astonished and told Klinsmann he disagreed with the move. U.S. Soccer officials scrambled to react to the fallout. By late that afternoon, Donovan and the other players who were cut were on their way out of town.

For all the uproar that followed Donovan’s cut — and whether you agree or disagree with how Klinsmann handled it — this much is clear: The confidence Klinsmann had in making his decision is exactly what U.S. Soccer was looking for when it hired him as coach.

As far back as 1998, after Klinsmann scored a memorable goal for Germany against the United States in a World Cup game, Sunil Gulati, now the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, tried to convince Klinsmann’s agent that Klinsmann should consider playing in M.L.S. When Gulati heard that Klinsmann was not interested in the travel demands of an American professional sports league, Gulati raised the possibility of Klinsmann’s signing with the Galaxy and playing only home games.

“I was like half-joking,” Gulati, who is also a senior lecturer in economics at Columbia, told me. “But I felt, even then, he was someone we wanted to be working with.”

In 2006, shortly after Klinsmann coached Germany to a stirring third-place finish in the World Cup, Gulati approached him about coaching the U.S. men’s national team. Klinsmann said no. In 2010, in South Africa, after the U.S. lost to Ghana in the Round of 16, Gulati again tried to hire him and again could not reach a suitable deal.

By 2011, however, things were different. Klinsmann had been through a tumultuous stretch as coach at Bayern Munich, the dominant club team in Germany; he was fired after just nine months, having apparently clashed with the team’s management. This round of negotiations with Gulati went more smoothly, and Klinsmann signed on to take over.

To Gulati, Klinsmann was what U.S. Soccer needed: a coach European enough to command the players’ respect, but American enough to embrace new advances in training and technology. He also saw Klinsmann as someone who would be able to relate to an ever-growing fan base that was looking for something — anything — fresh.

“Look, part of what we’re trying to do is excite people,” Gulati said. “And Jurgen’s charm is a piece of that. He’s a crossover. For us, at this point, it’s about selling the game in a way that, frankly, we haven’t had anyone, ever, do before.”

U.S. Soccer essentially turned over its house keys to Klinsmann. His base salary (said to be about $2.5 million per year) was more than any previous coach was paid. His support staff was larger than what any previous coach was given. His ambitions — to bring in an outside sports-training­ company, to push yoga and other unusual treatment techniques, to modify player nutrition, to analyze player blood work for deficiencies — were embraced and encouraged.

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Klinsmann listening to the national anthem before the game against Mexico in April.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

When Klinsmann snubbed Donovan after the sabbatical, plenty of officials were concerned, and some even discussed intervening. (None did.) When Klinsmann wanted to hold a training camp in São Paulo in January — a test run for the World Cup — the federation agreed, despite the considerable expense.

“That sort of thing was never afforded to me ahead of the World Cup in ’98,” says Steve Sampson, who coached the national team from 1995 to 1998. “I never had the resources Jurgen had. Never. He’s been afforded luxuries none of us could ever even dream of having.”

In December, at the end of a year in which the United States qualified for its seventh-straight World Cup, Gulati gave Klinsmann a four-year contract extension, as well as a new title, technical director for U.S. Soccer. The effect was to give Klinsmann even more latitude in dictating the direction of the national team — something he quickly showed by hastening the split with Donovan — as well as the overall progress of the sport in America.

“Someone once told me that in 2006, they described Jurgen as the C.E.O. of Project German National Team,” Gulati said. “He oversaw all of it, everything. And that’s what we wanted here. This isn’t the proverbial sprint; it’s a marathon.”

He added, “Actually, it’s a couple of them.”

The biggest challenge Klinsmann faces — and one he muses on often — is how to balance the need to win today with the need to grow for tomorrow. Growing is what drives Klinsmann. He wants to grow the United States’ expectations, its quality, its roster, its reach. Growth has always been something Klinsmann has focused on, but he has never found a more captive audience than soccer fans in America.

At lunch one Saturday last year, just before he scouted a game in Sinsheim, Germany, Klinsmann received a call on his cellphone. It was from a friend who informed him that there were rumors in the Mexican press that Klinsmann was being targeted as a potential coach of the struggling Mexican national team.

A few moments later, when Klinsmann went to the bathroom, Herzog laughed at the notion. “Can you imagine?” he said. “With Mexico, the pressure is crazy. They think the future is yesterday. Jurgen wants to build. He wants to have a plan. He loves to talk about what’s next.”

Klinsmann does not deny this. An hour later, we sat inside the Rhein-Neckar Arena as two German clubs, Hoffenheim and Hertha Berlin, prepared for their match. Klinsmann and Herzog were at the game to watch Fabian Johnson, a defender for Hoffenheim who is likely to get significant playing time for the United States at the World Cup. When Johnson made a strong attacking run from the back, Klinsmann and Herzog nodded to each other knowingly.

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Klinsmann heading to the locker room after his team's tie with Mexico.Credit...Luca Locatelli for The New York Times

Klinsmann was most excited that day, however, when a different player, a 21-year-old defender for Hertha named John Anthony Brooks, loped by. Brooks is the son of an American serviceman and a German mother — another one of those players with dual eligibility whom Klinsmann covets.

Klinsmann, as he has done regularly, played a significant role in persuading Brooks to pledge his loyalty to the United States team. Recruiting players is not something most national-team managers become intimately involved with — particularly because it generally happens when the player is a raw prospect — but Klinsmann approaches the task like a college-football coach.

He arranges for a jacket or a shirt to be mailed out. He tracks the player’s statistics and minutes at his club team. He gets on the phone, often impressing the player with the credibility that comes from being a European legend.

“Eight months before I had my first game for the U.S., he was texting me, talking to me about my career,” said Johannsson, 23, the forward who had to choose between playing for the United States or Iceland. “When I scored my first goal, he wrote to me. It meant a lot.”

Johannsson laughed. “I remember when I got my first voice mail from Jurgen Klinsmann. I was like, O.K., there’s no way Jurgen Klinsmann just called me. I was a small kid playing in Denmark. So I called my agent and said: ‘Are you messing with me? Why are you doing this? Did you have some guy with a German accent call me and leave a message?’ ”

Ultimately, Johannsson committed to the United States. Brooks did the same. More recently, another goal-scoring threat, Julian Green, who plays for Bayern Munich’s reserve team, declared his allegiance to Klinsmann as well.

For Klinsmann, these decisions are critical and no small part of the reason he wanted the extension Gulati gave him. He wanted security, yes. But he also wanted confirmation that for the immediate future, the path of American soccer will tend toward the mixed identity that he embodies.

“Do I feel European or American?” he said to me one afternoon. “I guess I feel both.”

I was reminded of that dual nature at the end of that day in Sinsheim, as Klinsmann made his way to the parking lot. The game ended about an hour earlier, and even Klinsmann, ever energetic, was slowing down. He had flown from California to Frankfurt the night before, landed, rented a car and driven south for the match. There had been lunch, meetings with a few old friends and the game itself. Then there was the post-match talk with his players, a meeting with Hoffenheim’s coach and more handshakes.

Finally, he was on his way out of the stadium, but there was a small crowd lingering nearby. He put his head down and tried to hustle past.

He had no chance. First it was a little boy who saw him and raced over, then a father and son, and then a group of women. Ten minutes later, he was still signing autographs for them, trying desperately to finish and get away. For the most part, he was on autopilot: take paper, wave pen, hand paper back, repeat.

But then, as he got to what appeared to be the final autograph-seeker in line, the man handed Klinsmann his program and stammered, in a red-blooded American accent: “Hi, Jurgen, thanks so much. How are you?”

Klinsmann looked up. He smiled at the man warmly. He started to speak, but then, over the man’s shoulder, he saw another group of fans heading down the concourse toward him. Clearly torn, he handed back the program and turned away, determined to make his escape before another line formed.

After a few steps, though, he could not resist. He looked back over his shoulder, locked eyes with the American man in Germany and called out to him. “I’m fantastic!” Klinsmann shouted. “How are you?”

A correction was made on 
June 6, 2014

An earlier version of a picture caption accompanying this article misstated the outcome of an exhibition match against Mexico. It was a 2-2 draw, not a U.S. victory.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 27 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Coach. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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